Sinai & Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible

INTRODUCTION

One of the distinctive aspects of the modern study of the Bible, as it has developed in the past century and a half, has been the effort to delineate a theology of the Old Testament alone, with minimal or negligible reference to the New Testament, which, in turn, has received its own separate treatment. What makes this innovation possible is the awareness that the canon of the Christian Bible, like any canon, flattens historical differences. A canon is a synchronic statement; every book in it, every chapter, every verse is contemporaneous with every other one. But history is diachronic, a film-strip rather than a snapshot. The awareness of this element of change and development, which is obscured by the canonical statement, makes it possible to speak of earlier stages on their own, and not simply in reference to the totality of the book as understood by one confessional community, in this case, the church.

One would think that the new approach to the Bible, the historical-critical approach, would have attracted a goodly number of Jews, since it offers the prospect of dealing with their Bible, the Hebrew Bible, on its own and not simply as a preparation or foil for the literature of some other community. Conversely, one would predict a new openness to Judaism as one source of insight into the Hebrew Bible, an openness that is impossible so long as that book is subordinated to the New Testament. One would have expected biblical theologians of Christian persuasion to have asked whether Jewish tradition sheds any light upon the religion of most ancient Israel which their own religious orientation has prevented them from glimpsing for nearly two thousand years. The sad fact, however, is that the endeavor known as Old Testament theology has been, as its name suggests, an almost exclusively Gentile affair. Indeed, its evaluation of the central institutions of ancient Israel does not depart in substance from those provided by the premodern Christian tradition. It is as though the historical-critical methods have yet to take deep root. Pockets of old bias remain untouched.

The two major institutions of the religion of ancient Israel in which Christian, especially Protestant, stereotypes continue to dominate are also, it can be argued, the two major foci of ancient Israelite religion itself: law (Torah) and Temple. Critical scholarship has not been very successful at shaking the view of the Torah of the Christian apostle Paul, the view that it is something deadening, a bearer of curse, and a temporary measure (Galatians 3). Julius Wellhausen, the greatest Old Testament scholar of the nineteenth century, saw law as a symptom of spiritual desiccation. After the spirit of the oldest men of God, Moses at the head of them, had been in a fashion laid to sleep in institutions, he wrote, it sought and found in the prophets a new opening, and the prophets do not stand in debt to those institutions, but precede them and are free of them.¹ Wellhausen was not an orthodox Christian. His critical methods shook the church and endangered his career. But in his negative view of Torah and of Judaism, the religion of Torah, he was both a staunch traditionalist and an adumbration of future trends in Old Testament theology. For example, half a century later, Walther Eichrodt, whose Theology of the Old Testament rejects most of Wellhausen’s attutudes, still wrote of Judaism as the degradation of the law.² Eichrodt’s evaluation of law in the Old Testament itself is higher than Wellhausen’s. But he is no more willing than his predecessor to consider the possibility that Judaism, which regards the Mosaic law as still valid, might have something to teach Christians, who see it as something superseded. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Temple has fared no better. Sometimes one is inclined to think that Old Testament theologians are simply looking for new words in which to re-enact Jesus’ curse upon the Temple (Matt 24:1–2). In Wellhausen’s mind, the priestly school which established and regulated an elaborate cultus was a manifestation of spiritual decadence and aridity, the true father of Judaism.³ Three quarters of a century later, in America, the most widely used textbook of Old Testament studies describes Solomon’s Temple as an invasion of Canaanite culture right into the center of Israel’s life and worship.⁴ In this instance, the affinities of Solomon’s edifice with temples throughout the ancient Near East (which any critical historian would have predicted) furnishes a new club with which to beat the old boogeyman. Only the weapon is different.

What these examples suggest is not that biblical studies are stagnant; on the contrary, there have been immense discoveries in archaeology, epigraphy, and history. Whole civilizations have been discovered. Infinitely more is known about the biblical world now than in Wellhausen’s time, a fortiori the era of the Talmudic rabbis, the apostles, and Church Fathers. What is suggested, however, is that change has been more rapid and more general in these ancillary disciplines than in the theological study of the Hebrew Bible, where old habits of mind remain intact, either ignoring the new data or awkwardly fitting them into the inherited structures. The image of scholars who deprecate some of the major features of a religion which they aim to present sympathetically has always been odd. The new discoveries and new perspectives which they seem to open make it all the odder.

The goal of the present volume is to present these two foci of the religion of ancient Israel, Torah and Temple, from a perspective which is different from that of the consensus. Use will be made of the new discoveries, and the post-biblical Jewish tradition will often be brought in where it is relevant. I make no claim that Rabbinic Judaism offers the correct understanding of the Hebrew Bible. One need not subscribe to the regnant prejudice to see that Talmudic religion is different from its biblical ancestor, one of the major differences being the presence in it of a Bible. But the change seems more evolutionary than revolutionary; it lacks the quantum leap apparent in the Christian claim of a new Israel and, ultimately, a New Testament. It is this willingness to consider rabbinic tradition on occasion and to highlight its relevance to the Hebrew Bible and vice versa which makes this volume "An Entry into the Jewish Bible." The ultimate measure of success or failure adopted here, however, is not conformity to the Jewish tradition, but whether or not the reading proposed is true to the biblical texts themselves. My claim is that because Judaism lacks an overwhelming motivation to deny the pluriform character of the Hebrew Bible in behalf of a uniform reading—such as the christological reading—Jewish exegesis evidences a certain breadth and a certain relaxed posture, both of which are necessary if the Hebrew Bible is to receive a fair hearing. The fruits of these should not be excluded in advance.

An approach which is open to the texts as they stand (and not only as later tradition conceives them), to Near Eastern research, and to Jewish tradition as a resource is still a relative rarity, for the modern Jew is heir to a legacy of biblical study which he is often loath to claim. The medieval era was one of exciting advance in the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible. Between 900 and 1500 C.E., commentaries and studies of great and enduring value were produced in large numbers in the Near East and in Europe, and these drew special strength from the fact that they were often fertilized by deep involvement on the part of their authors in the larger cultures in which Jewry found itself. In contrast, in the modern period, the Jew’s approach to his Bible has just as often been marked by a defensiveness whose counterpart in the world of scholarship is timidity or minimalism, a reluctance to address religious issues and a preference for other aspects of modern biblical study. This defensiveness is a reflection of the fact that Jewry has not, on the whole, responded well to the challenges of modernity, or at least to its theological dimension. There is, in fact, a quantum leap between the traditional rabbinic approach to the Hebrew Bible and modern critical study. The latter is often said to have begun with the isolation, some two centuries ago, of four sources identified by the letters, J, E, D, and P.⁵ What was most threatening about the emergence of source criticism was that it undermined belief in the historical unity of the Torah and in the belief that it was revealed, as tradition held, to Moses upon Mount Sinai. On the contrary, the modern critic sees all four sources as post-Mosaic (if Moses may be considered historical) and as reflections of the eras in which they were composed. The recovery of these differences in eras allows the modern scholar to reconstruct the history of biblical Israel, for it frees him from the need to see the religion as revealed in its entirety at one moment, in other words, as lacking a history altogether. Thus, the historical study and the contemporary practice of the tradition came to be seen as opposed to one another. In the minds of probably most Jews, one had to choose between historical consciousness or an allegiance to traditional religion (Torah); one could not have both. Judaism, wrote Joseph H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain earlier in this century, stands and falls with its belief in the historic actuality of the Revelation at Sinai.⁶ Rabbi Hertz’ implication was that the only way one can be a biblical historian and a faithful Jew is by developing empirical corroboration for what he already knows by faith, namely, the contents of the Torah as rabbinic tradition understands them. In other words, biblical history is not really to be empirical at all. The ultimate criterion for acceptance of an idea is not the intrinsic cogency of the argument and of the evidence upon which it stands, but whether it conforms to inherited dogma. Biblical history is to be merely confirmatory. Anything new that it finds must not be discordant with what is known, or assumed on faith. Real discovery becomes impossible.

The argument might be offered that the orthodoxy of which Rabbi Hertz’ statement is characteristic imagines that the tradition was monolithic on the issues of the conflict of empirical evidence and faith, when it really was not. In the great work of post-biblical Judaism, the Talmud, for example, one rabbi doubts that Moses wrote the last eight verses of the Torah (Deut 34:5–12) on the grounds that he could not have written about his own death and burial. The retort is immediately offered that it was not Moses, but God, who composed these verses; Moses wrote them down in tears.⁷ The revealing point is that the first position assumes that a commitment to tradition does not require the Jew to ignore empirical evidence in the name of an increasingly blind faith. One wonders where the Talmudic sage who voiced the doubt would have stood in the modern dispute, when so much more evidence against Mosaic authorship has been developed. In any event, doubts or ambivalence about Mosaic authorship of the Torah and a host of other traditional beliefs appear on occasion in medieval commentaries which the tradition accepts.⁸ Even the possibility of scribal error in the text of the Torah as it reaches us seems to have occurred to some of the great rabbinic exegetes.⁹ It is surely the case that a few of them were willing to entertain the notion that the plain sense of a verse can contradict the normative law (halakhah) which the Talmudic rabbis derived from it.¹⁰ In instances of this sort, what is interesting and possibly enlightening for the modern situation is that awareness of the contradiction does not seem to have dampened the exegetes’ commitment either to observance of halakhah or to the exposition of the plain sense of scripture. This would imply that Jewish tradition includes a form of biblical scholarship which is more than the mere repetition, rearrangement, or extension of data known through the tradition itself. Tradition, so understood, will include novelty, even contradiction. It will not be fossilized, but vital, growing, and, to a certain extent, changing.

Whatever dim adumbrations of modern methods antiquity and the Middle Ages may have bequeathed us, it is certainly the case that biblical criticism poses a massive challenge to premodern tradition, for historical consciousness in the modern mode was not part of the mental apparatus of those who formulated the classic tradition.¹¹ The great question for those of a modern cast of mind who also desire to affirm the rabbinic tradition is: How can we fit history as it is perceived and reconstructed by modern individuals into a theological (rather than humanistic) framework? We have seen that Rabbi Hertz’ answer was that we cannot, and this remains the answer of most of those who strive to observe halakhah. The presupposition underlying it is that no interpretation, in Rabbi Hertz’ words, "…is valid or in consonance with the Jewish Theistic position, which makes human reason or the human personality the source of such revelation.¹² The question must be asked, however, whether the choice really lies between belief in the historic actuality of the Revelation at Sinai and a liberal humanism which substitutes man’s conscience for God’s word. Can it not be the case that the literary form of the Torah conveys a truth which is not historical in nature? Is not fiction a valid mode of knowledge,¹³ a mode of which God himself may have made use? Must we assume that the conventions of attribution of authorship among ancient semites were the same as those of later eras, so that all pseudepigraphical literature is only forgery? In short, what needs to be developed—and this is the prime task of Jewish philosophy in our time¹⁴ —is a model of divine revelation which takes account of the involvement of the Hebrew Bible in history and its character as imaginative literature and does not seek to deny this involvement and this character in the name of faith. The new model, when it emerges, will surely diverge significantly from what has been the tradition, but some elements of the tradition, such as the study of the Hebrew Bible, will grow stronger as a result. For the fact is that the belief in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and kindred items of premodern conviction claim the allegiance today only of those Jews and Christians whose prior commitment of faith forbids them to accept anything else. As a result, among Jews at least, they have become a small minority, and most of the people of the Book" are alienated from the Book, even at times repelled by it.

Two misconceptions about the isolation of J, E, D, and P (the documentary hypothesis) are common in the Jewish community. First, there is the notion that modern biblical scholarship (biblical criticism) is a Gentile entity and the product of the traditional Christian impulse to undermine Judaism.¹⁵ The truth is that the new methods undermine premodern Christianity as much as they undermine premodern Judaism, as one sees from the original reception of Wellhausen’s work among Christian believers. The flash points are different: the Christian arch-traditionalist may be more upset by evolution, for example, than by the documentary hypothesis. The underlying theology is different: the Christian demands literalism, whereas the Jew demands conformity to post-biblical traditions of exegesis, which are often remote from the literal sense. But in each case, the opposition is not between Judaism and Christianity. This does not shake my point that the evaluation of elements of ancient Israelite religion more central to Jews than to Christians has often tended among Christian biblicists to be negative. The anti-Jewish bias, however, is a carry-over from religious traditionalism and not a contribution of critical methods per se.

The second misconception is that the isolation of documentary sources remains the center of attention among biblical critics. The truth is that a whole host of other methods and other interests have come to the fore over the past three-quarters of a century, although seldom do these newer approaches impugn the need to identify and to date literary sources behind the present form of the text. In America, the dominant approach has been the application of insights into the world of biblical Israel, the ancient Near East, to the Hebrew Bible itself. Over the course of the last century, there has been a geometric expansion of our knowledge of the biblical world. The Hebrew Bible, essentially the only source of such knowledge available to the medieval commentators, now provides only a small proportion of our knowledge, one that becomes smaller with each new discovery. To a limited degree, the recovery of the cultural context of the Hebrew Bible does not threaten, but rather enriches the premodern traditions of exegesis. For example, the classic commentator, confronting an obscure Hebrew word, would turn to related languages, Aramaic and Arabic, or even to an unrelated language, like Greek,¹⁶ for an etymology. Presumably, if he could have benefited from the discovery of other ancient languages from the region—Akkadian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Phoenician—he would have made ample use of them as well. The problem comes from the fact that the archaeological discoveries have provided more than information on individual words. They have also provided data about the history of Israel and of the culture of the surrounding people, and these data often cannot be absorbed into the tradition as it stands. Although in the popular mind, archaeology is often thought to prove the Bible true (i.e., historical), this is seldom the case, and it is occasionally the opposite of the truth.¹⁷

To give only one example, a recent survey of the traditions about the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) in the light of Near Eastern sources, including excavations, concludes that these traditions cannot be accurate historically.¹⁸ No less revolutionary is the discovery that the claim Israel makes to being a unique people in the world (1 Chr 17:21) is also open to grave doubt. The Near Eastern approach has developed parallels to almost every aspect of Israel’s culture.¹⁹ Her laws resemble Mesopotamian law; her Temple is typically Canaanite; even her monotheism, as we shall see in Part 1, is composed of elements attested outside herself, all of them older than she. It could, of course, be argued that the overall configuration of these elements is unique to Israel, that the bricks may be found elsewhere, but the building is distinctive. This is true. It is, however, also true of the other cultures. There never was another Egypt, another Sumer, another Babylonia, another Canaan, another Greece, another Rome. Every complex culture is, in its totality, unique.

My experience has been that the desire to uphold a belief in the uniqueness of Israel is strongest among Jews.²⁰ It is a species of argumentation in support of supernatural beliefs by means of rationalistic arguments. In other words, if Israel can be shown to be radically discontinuous with her environment, then the likelihood is increased that her identity is the result of supernatural intervention, just as the bible says (e.g., Gen 12:1–3). Or, if one prefers secular nationalism to traditional theology, then the discontinuity would seem to validate a heroic interpretation of Jewish survival: the Jewish spirit overcomes history. In either case, the argument is weak. There is no logical necessity that something be unprecedented or unparalleled when it is revealed; God can work through history as well as in spite of it. Nor can one assume that a feature is essential to the Hebrew Bible simply because it is, so far as we now know, unparalleled. On the contrary, what is essential may also be a Near Eastern commonplace. For example, few would see philanthropy towards the poor, the widow, and the orphan²¹ as peripheral to the biblical vision of justice. The fact that it is well attested throughout the ancient Near East²² does not present any logical challenge to its centrality in Israel. The nationalistic approach is no better; the Jews are in history, both benefitting and suffering from it, and not divorced from it by some factor of mysterious but natural origin.

II

In spite of the changes which the tradition underwent throughout biblical times, there are certain generalities which an awareness of history does not substantially undermine. The purpose of this volume is not to trace the history of the ideas and institutions in question, but, rather, to utilize the historical background in order to elucidate the texts which are their classic statement. Some concern with historical change, with the diachronic dimension, is inevitable if we are not to slip into a comfortable but discredited form of traditionalism. But the essential approach of this book is synchronic and literary, with the focus not on the minor permutations in time, but on the enduring continuities understood in the broad historical context. Most of the literature which is its subject is from the period of the Israelite monarchies, the last of which came to its end in 587 B.C.E., and from the immediate aftermath of that calamity. The question of how Israel faced the loss of land, Temple, and throne, the great theological crisis of the Exile, does not fall within our purview. Nonetheless, a discussion of the two great mountain traditions, that of Sinai and that of Zion, can clarify the ideas which gave Israelite religion and all later forms of Judaism, including the Judaism of our day, their characteristic shape and their phenomenal durability. To what extent such a clarification can enrich a Christian’s reading of his Old Testament is ultimately not for me to judge. But if a Jew can recapture something of the original context of his Bible without thereby undermining rabbinic tradition, it would seem possible for a believing Christian as well to read this Old Testament in such a way as to hear anew tones that his tradition has muted or hushed. If both communities can grow through a common reappropriation of a book for which they do not share even a name, then the possibilities for fraternal respect may grow as well.

1

Sinai,

the Mountain

of the Covenant

1

1. THE SINAITIC EXPERIENCE

OR THE TRADITIONS ABOUT IT?

Whatever the experience of the people Israel on Mount Sinai was, it was so overwhelming that the texts about it seem to be groping for an adequate metaphor through which to convey the awesomeness of the event. For example, in the description in Exod 19:16–22, the first verse seems to describe a hurricane—thunder, lightning, a mysterious cloud. But v 18 presents an image more like that of a volcano—smoke and fire on the mountain, like the fire of a furnace. Both verses mention quaking, the quaking of the people before this momentous sight (v 16) and the quaking of the mountain itself (v 18), which is no more secure than the people against the descent of YHWH, the God of Israel. Fear pervades the spectacle, a fear that infects nature as much as humanity. At the same time, the sight exerts an eerie appeal, which tempts the people to break through to catch a glimpse (v 21), but to yield to this temptation is to risk YHWH’s displeasure. If they break through to him, he will break out against them (v 22). Even the priests, who have been singled out—or will be, as the received text has it, a few chapters later—to minister in the presence of God, must submit to special rites of sanctification if they are to survive the Sinaitic experience. In other words, we see here two contrasting movements. The first speaks of an intersection between the lives of God and of Israel. The two meet at Mount Sinai. Moses, the representative of Israel, ascends the mountain onto